Tony Clement vows innovative new open government, but critics point to poor record

Jason Fekete, Postmedia News01.03.2012

Treasury Board president Tony Clement, with staff, holds a Twitter town hall with Canadians on what they would like to see in the federal government's new Open Government initiative, in Ottawa on December 15. At a time when opposition parties accuse the government of being the most secretive in history, the federal government's Open Government initiative aims to publish more information online and communicate with Canadians through social media.David Kawai
/ Postmedia News

Treasury Board president Tony Clement, with staff, holds a Twitter town hall with Canadians on what they would like to see in the federal government's new Open Government initiative, in Ottawa on December 15. At a time when opposition parties accuse the government of being the most secretive in history, the federal government's Open Government initiative aims to publish more information online and communicate with Canadians through social media.David Kawai
/ Postmedia News

OTTAWA — New applications for your smart phones, "crowdsourcing" government decisions down to the people and hosting Twitter town halls.

Welcome to Treasury Board president Tony Clement's ambitious new world.

Clement is arguably the top social media guru within the Conservative caucus and is leading Ottawa's new Open Government initiative that he says will disseminate federal information like never before.

It will be a tall order for a government that critics argue is the most secretive in Canadian history. Opposition parties regularly get stonewalled when trying to obtain federal government information and it routinely takes several months for public servants to respond to access-to-information inquiries.

Indeed, the government's own numbers show it has been releasing less information over the past five years and increasingly exempting federal documents from disclosure.

Clement said he hopes to improve both transparency and the government's reputation with a series of new measures meant to increase public dialogue with government and the amount of federal information available to citizens.

"Part of what I'm doing is culture change. The culture of government — any government, any political party, any jurisdiction in the world — you have a certain amount of culture that is 'hoard the information, information being power.' We are trying to break that down," Clement said in an interview with Postmedia News.

"The point of it all is to make sure that government is connected to citizens and that we are helpful in disseminating important information, and perhaps creating new innovations that will help our economy."

The government's broader open government project is split into three initiatives focused on data sets, information requests and public dialogue.

On the open information file, the government has mandated that, starting Jan. 1, all federal departments and agencies must post summaries of completed access-to-information requests on their websites within about 30 days of delivering the response.

But Canada's information watchdog said federal numbers clearly show the government is withholding more and more information and taking longer to release the documents it does disclose.

"What we can conclude from the government's own statistics is that the regime itself has been in a steady decline in terms of performance," said Information Commissioner Suzanne Legault.

"We definitely need to amend the legislation."

In 2005, before the Conservatives came to power, the federal government received approximately 25,000 access-to-information requests, disclosing all information requested 27 per cent of the time, with partial information released 43 per cent of the time.

By 2010, of the roughly 35,000 access-to-information inquiries, about 16 per cent of the requests had all of the information disclosed, while 62 per cent of them only had information partially disclosed.

The number of exemptions and exclusions used by the government (there can be multiple ones per request) to limit disclosure of information soared to nearly 51,000 in the 2010 fiscal year — compared to about 28,000 five years earlier.

In 2001-02, the government used national security exemptions about five per cent of the time, but that exemption is now being used 20 per cent of the time, she said.

And a decade ago, 69 per cent of all access-to-information requests had records disclosed within 30 days, but that number has dropped to 56 per cent.

Opposition parties laugh at the Tories' commitment to more transparent and accountable government.

NDP pit bull MP Charlie Angus said it's difficult to believe the minister is interested in transparency when the government ignored normal protocols for selecting 32 projects in Clement's Ontario riding that were included in the $50-million G8 Legacy Infrastructure Fund.

Democracy watchdogs say promises of more openness are simply a facade to what's actually happening behind the scenes.

Tyler Sommers, co-ordinator with Ottawa-based Democracy Watch, said the government is simply making it easier for citizens to access information that is already public and clamping down on anything remotely controversial.

"They definitely haven't met their open government pledge," Sommers argued. "The trend has been release less information."

The information commissioner, however, said the federal open government efforts should not be discounted, noting the commitment was included in the throne speech.

But meeting international open government standards requires Canada to improve its legislation and information practices, she said.

"The standards definitely have to be very high," she said.

Legault is also worried the government's multibillion-dollar spending review could leave access-to-information resources and staff on the chopping block.

"It definitely is an area at risk," she added. "I'm very leery about the cuts and the potential negative impacts."

Critics also argue that the government's pledge to release summaries of information requests simply replicates a similar database that previously existed but was cancelled by the Harper government.

Nevertheless, Clement believes in the new measures and said the open data might have the most potential.

The government has uploaded more than 265,000 data sets to its website in what it says is a more useful and machine-readable format. It includes information on everything from wait times at the Canada-U.S. border, to economic and population tables from Statistics Canada, to historical data on federal elections.

Clement hopes the private sector, researchers, citizens and non-governmental organizations will use the data to develop such things as useful consumer applications for smart phones, tablet computers and the like.

He noted Google Maps is an example of a company using public transit data available on websites around the globe to develop consumer-friendly tools.

On open dialogue, Clement hopes to use new media to communicate more effectively with the public and decentralize some decision-making down to citizens.

The minister held a Twitter town hall in mid-December as part of a public consultation on how to improve its transparency, as Canada prepares to join the International Open Government Partnership and present its plan to a global forum in Brazil in a few months.

Democracy Watch said it will appeal to the international open government group to reject Canada's entry because the federal government failed to keep one of its required commitments to consult Canadians. Ottawa announced its online consultation one day after the watchdog complained about it.

And in what seems like a unique form of Canadian federalism, Clement said he would like to let citizens make more decisions on local matters, rather than having bureaucrats in government offices deciding what's best for communities. He calls it crowdsourcing decisions.

"In today's day and age, crowdsourcing does work. Not all these decisions have to be made by political actors," he said.

"That's the holy grail that we're perhaps looking for," he added. "Working together with the wisdom of crowds, you can come up with some neat solutions."

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Tony Clement vows innovative new open government, but critics point to poor record

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